Driving Automation in Australia
An interview with Dr. Megan Sharkey
Programming note: this is the last new issue of Changing Lanes until after Labour Day. I am taking August off from new content, and will be reposting older content, which many newer subscribers will not have seen. Back in September, after Labour Day, with some exciting announcements to share!
In 2019 the New South Wales government took over a disused country airfield at Cudal, in the central west of the state, and began turning it into a place to test the crash-avoidance systems in new cars. When Dr. Megan Sharkey arrived at the start of 2021, the brief she was handed was: we’ve built this little facility, and what should we do with it?
What she did with it was to build the assurance pipeline for automated driving in Australia, and then spend six years contributing to national automated-vehicle regulations. That policy has been written, and reviewed by every state… but not enacted. Last month she left Transport for New South Wales and moved home to the United States, with that policy still absent.
For all these reasons, Australia has something to teach other federations on how to make safe driving automation succeed: both what to do, and what to avoid.
I met Sharkey a few years ago, when she was serving as Senior Manager, Future Mobility Testing and Assurance at Transport for New South Wales, a role she held until a few weeks ago (at time of publication). She is one of the people who has done the most work to prepare Australia for the arrival of driving automation.
I feel some kinship for Sharkey, because, like me, she has followed an unconventional route into this world. She trained in biochemistry in Louisiana, intending medicine, but when that path didn’t work out, she spent several years cleaning up radioactive oil-field waste in the Middle East. Preferring sustainability work, and having met an Australian who encouraged her to go back to school in Sydney, she enrolled in a master’s-degree programme on retrofitting cities. Seeking a job, she asked a guest lecturer about opportunities, who knew of one in transport. Sixteen and a half years in Australian mobility followed.
We spoke on 23 July 2026. The transcript of our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Dr. Megan Sharkey (provided photo)
Why We Still Need Physical Proving Grounds
Andrew Miller: You mentioned the Future Mobility Testing Centre. How do I pronounce the name of its town?
Megan Sharkey: It’s “Cu-dal.” Like “CUE-doll.”
AM: Cudal. I knew you had such a facility, but I never saw it, and I don’t think most people have ever seen a future-mobility centre. There are a few: one here in Ottawa I’ve visited, another in San Francisco I’ll see later this year. Tell me about yours. What happens there?
MS: The site was bought at the end of 2019, early 2020, to serve ANCAP: the New Car Assessment Program.1 The US does it, Australia does it, Europe does it, parts of Asia do it. It rates how safe a car is, from one star to five. Then came the recognition that all these automated features exist, and that the new star programs need to test them: how they stop crashes from happening. I came in at the start of 2021, and they said, “We’ve built this little airport. What should we do with it?”
To me, the logical move was to expand it.
All the trials we ran across government took a very long time to clear the safety-assurance process. So, we thought, let’s do it first at Cudal, and maybe speed up the acceptance process. And that’s what we did. We looked at various automated-vehicle trials and ran them through to prove the safety case. When our adaptive-signals team wanted to make changes, we built the smartest traffic lights there, tested the latency and the failure modes, and then deployed quickly. It genuinely shrank our trial-deployment time.
We used it to demonstrate everything we couldn’t yet put on the road: e-scooters and e-bikes, battery-recovery trailers, AI on buses, 5G and wildlife detection. So it took the regulatory function we needed for safety and married it to everything we wanted to do quickly.
AM: For automated driving you don’t need to persuade me of the value of a testing centre. But let me play devil’s advocate. On one side, you now have computers: you can do virtual testing, and with AVs you can run millions of synthetic miles. On the other, there’s no substitute for real-world conditions. A testing centre sits uneasily between the two. It isn’t real-world conditions, yet it still demands physical space and physical testing, and you can’t iterate quickly. What’s the strong case for it, against those two points?
MS: A few things. The first is failure testing, and we did a great deal of it. Take red-light warning cameras: what happens when the system fails? How do the redundancy systems kick in? We deliberately tried to make the vehicle fail. You can’t do that in the real world, because there are so many people around, but at the facility you can. And deliberately failing a system and then triaging it is fantastic for building executives’ confidence, and for working out emergency procedures. The failure testing you do on-site is what earns the safety-assurance approval and lets a system move from the virtual environment into the real world. That’s why a government would want to own one of these, and why places like Mcity, or GoMentum Station near San Francisco, exist. You throw things in front of a vehicle and find out when it breaks. It’s hard to simulate glare convincingly, or rain. But on the track, you can create those conditions.
The second reason is the ANCAP and regulatory side: all the tick-boxes we make commercial providers clear, whether for heavy vehicles, design rules, or any other system. If you’re going to attach a regulatory function to something, you’d better be able to check it. Even if you grant every approval, you need to be able to audit it, and a physical facility lets you do that.
And the third is social change: the demonstrations you can run at a physical centre that you can’t run in the real world. Driving straight at a pedestrian dummy to show how emergency braking saves lives. And that was significant, because of how many people I brought on-site: a big emergency-vehicle demonstration for a few hundred people in my first twelve months, then executive site visits every few months after that. There’s a misconception that because you work in transport, you understand what the tech can do. But it isn’t most people’s job, and they may hold the money and make the decisions without understanding the technology. I’d say: you think ADAS lane-assist is worth turning off? Let’s run it and show you the difference. You didn’t have to explain it; they got it. It meant we had advocates back in other parts of Transport: people in communications, training, finance, who now actually understood it.
The Law Is Written, but Not Passed
AM: I can imagine, especially given the approach Australia has embraced. Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that Australia doesn’t want to be the Wild West, or the Wild South. It doesn’t want deployment first and figuring it out later. It wants regulation, as far as possible national regulation, ahead of time.
MS: Yes. Australia is a very regulatory country. Compared with the UK or the US, it has more regulation, and it really tries to de-risk the safety and social effects a new technology might bring. With automated vehicles, the focus has largely been national, and our facility fed into that, as did I. Then you lean on the rules, and the rest is for a state to handle: the road rules, insurance, policing, everything they already do for private vehicles. In contrast to a “let’s just let it happen” approach, there are very clear rules saying you must have a driver behind the vehicle. So for it to scale, that has to change.
AM: How has it been going? On one hand, despite the ambition, there’s still no national AV law. On the other, Australia was, with New Zealand, the first market where Tesla sold its so-called Supervised Full Self-Driving, on the British arrangement rather than the American one, driving on the left. So it’s a debut right-hand-drive jurisdiction for that, ahead of Britain itself.
MS: It’s a funny one. The Tesla team worked very closely with us on what the regulatory barriers might be, and got in early enough to work out where the grey zone was. And the grey zone is what “driver control” means. The driver-monitoring in their FSD is well above what [is common] in the US: glance down for a few seconds and it pings you for not paying attention; ignore it enough times and it switches off and won’t let you turn it back on for a while. So they argued that if the driver has to pay attention, and touch the wheel every so often, they’re still in control, and we can thread through this “level two-plus-plus.” They’ve done that quite effectively.
The national law itself has actually been done for a while. It’s written and it’s systematic. What’s left is getting national ministers willing to take the next steps in the consultation process. It’s been drafted, consulted on multiple times; there’s a final draft. Now it just has to walk through those next steps, which could take six months or three years. Given the run of elections, it hasn’t been a priority. The work is finished, it’s been through the wringer, the states have reviewed it. The next bit is a minister making it a priority and saying it’s time to release it.
AM: An obvious accelerant might be Waymo knocking on the door. They have just set up French, German, Dutch, and Iberian subsidiaries. They’ll be in the UK later this year if things go well, and they’re already in Japan. Here in Canada they have never said anything officially, but public records show they’ve hired lobbyists to talk to Toronto and Vancouver. And apparently people have caught them looking for office space in Sydney. Would that change the equation?
MS: No, it wouldn’t.
Ausburn, Kate. Sydney Opera House Car Park. 28 Jan. 2012. Flickr.
If you dig into it—the media obtained, through an FOI, all our interactions with Waymo, so they’re now on the public record—the reality is it hasn’t sped things up. It has increased the minister’s office’s willingness to look at the range of AV proposals; that wasn’t on their radar before, and now that Waymo and Tesla are applying pressure, it is. But the New South Wales government has a state election next March [2027], and they’re not really willing to decide before then. So it’ll be a slow burn for Waymo.
But when it does happen, whichever company meets the standards laid out in any eventual expression of interest for a commercial trial will win first, and win at scale, for a substantial market period. So there’s a real benefit to them lingering, even another twelve months, because whoever is let off the leash first is going to win.
What Australia Gets Right
AM: That’s the first-mover advantage, and it’s easy to imagine. But the fact that there’s a national law at all, even one waiting in the wings, is something I salute Australia for, because the United States still has no national law. A few bills have gone before Congress and died, so California and the sunbelt states have moved ahead on their own. In Canada there’s no national movement whatsoever: Ontario has moved ahead, Quebec more slowly, and British Columbia has said absolutely not. So among federal nations, Australia seems to be an outlier in actually getting its act together nationally.
MS: I’ll grant that on some things we did our thinking earlier, and that’s led the space. The logic was: states already have separate transport laws, so it makes sense to do the same for automated vehicles. What’s different about AVs? This part needs to be in a national law; that part can be handled by the states later, because it’s about enforcement. Not easy, mind you: the teams worked on it for six years, and a substantial part of my time went into it. But once you can separate what’s national from what’s state, and a heavily regulated country has run that exercise across so many domains, Australia is genuinely good at it. The US isn’t quite there on what a state should own versus what the nation should. Australia has a playbook across everything. Health, whatever: they’ve done it before, argued it out, and they know where the line is. That took away half the battle.
AM: The Canadian example is inexact, because our provinces, Quebec especially, are extremely jealous of the federal government. They won’t cede anything they don’t have to; even things they arguably should cede, they won’t. That makes frameworks like this harder to agree on.
MS: And that’s actually a positive, in a way. Yes, we’re dragging a little, but when it comes out, it’ll be clear: you’ll know what the feds do and what the states do. It’s one of the things the commercial companies I speak to appreciate. They wish we’d move faster, but it’s clear who owns what. Tick all the federal boxes, and you know what that then means for the state approvals you need.
AM: You’ve been abroad for almost two decades, and now here you are, back on home turf in the USA. What prompted the shift?
MS: Fifty different things. But part of it, and this is probably what we’ll talk about, is that future mobility wasn’t where I wanted it to be inside government. I couldn’t push things quickly enough. I was enjoying the work, but I wanted to move faster across this space.
And honestly, there’s limited ability to write while in government. There were so many things where they’d say, “Megan, you can’t do anything else.” I had an adjunct position; I wasn’t allowed to attend any events. We had an automated-vehicle conference in Australia in October: they said do whatever you want, but I couldn’t get approval. And I thought, I can’t stay here going backwards, unable to say anything publicly, just idling professionally while you decide whether you want to move forward.
AM: I understand perfectly; I’ve been in that trap myself. I am sure you will not be idling for very long.
Megan Sharkey, thank you for your time.
After my conversation with Dr. Sharkey was over, I reflected on things that I had learned.
One is that NSW spent A$30 million enlarging its facility, more than doubling the length of its test track, and funding the heavy-vehicle testing Sharkey argued for. But NSW also would not approve her to attend Australia’s own automated-vehicle conference, nor to publish work, and at least partially for those reasons, Australia has lost Sharkey, and her institutional knowledge, to the United States.
Similarly, the one automated-driving product Australians can buy did not wait for the law. Tesla got to market by working out, with Sharkey’s team, where the grey zone in ‘driver control’ was, and Australia became a debut right-hand-drive market for Supervised Full Self-Driving despite the absence of a national framework. That means that Australia, which is one of the most regulation-forward countries in the Anglosphere, arrived at deployment the same way that less regulated ones do: bilaterally and case-by-case.
Finally, I noted that, as I mentioned to Sharkey, Waymo has incorporated in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Iberia; is preparing to launch in the UK; has begun testing in Japan; and has retained lobbyists in Canada. In Australia, it has looked at office space. Clearly, in Waymo’s own ranking, Australia is not near the top; the government’s lackadaisical approach to regulating the sector has surely contributed to that assessment.
These items point at the same lesson for governments everywhere. It is that refusing to make decisions or commit to a posture doesn’t mean nothing happens. It means instead that things happen, but in other places, and without public input. As driving automation becomes better and more widespread, governments everywhere had better act, and act better, if they want to seize the benefits on their terms, rather than be left behind.
In August 2024, an A$30 million expansion was announced, buying 100 hectares of adjacent farmland, quadrupling the centre to over 130 hectares, and adding a 4.4-kilometre highway-speed loop and a heavy-vehicle skid pad.